"(South Korean President) Lee Myung-bak woke up this morning and got scared of some immature kid (North Korean leader Kim Jong-un) and decided to stop us," the event's organizer Pak Sang-hak said as he confronted police on the highway.

He stopped them from sending leaflets to NK after NK threatened military retaliation. Tough, tough guy.

He stopped them from sending leaflets to NK after NK threatened military retaliation. Tough, tough guy.

Whether people agree with me or not, South Korean right-wing politicians still need the North Korean military (not the government) to generate the "North Korean military is evil and you should vote for us to stop it" idea to the South Korean public.

S. Korea fails to block activists from dropping propaganda leaflets in North

SEOUL — South Korean police on Monday tried for hours to block a civic group from sending pro-democracy leaflets across the border by balloon after North Korea threatened the activists with a “merciless military strike,” but the South’s efforts ultimately failed.

Hundreds of police swarmed roads near the peninsula’s demilitarized zone, encircling the vehicles that were transporting activists to the planned launch site. After a 3 1/2 hour standoff, the activists retreated, 200,000 leaflets still in the back of a van.

But hours later, after backtracking and eluding police, about 10 activists — compared with the 80 who started the day — made it to Ganghwa Island, not far from the border, where they released half of their leaflets.

“We wanted to show our strong intentions,” group leader Park Sang-hak said by phone.

Though it ultimately failed to stop the leaflet launch, the South’s attempt to intervene marked a sharp departure from recent years, when North Korean threats were either shrugged off or answered with daring defiance. Even previous balloon launches by activists, which also sparked North Korean threats of military action, went off as planned.

Monday’s police-enforced de-escalation comes two months ahead of a tight election to replace hard-line President Lee Myung-bak, and each of the three leading candidates have called for a more conciliatory approach to the North. Polls suggest that a majority of South Koreans want rapprochement, after several years in which Seoul cut off virtually all aid and Pyongyang responded with a pair of military strikes that caused multiple fatalities.

“The South Korean government must feel the need to manage the situation by not causing problems,” said Kim Heung-kyu, a political science professor at the Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul. “They don’t want to give any excuses for provocations” ahead of the election, because “any North Korea-related problems now can be burdensome for the ruling party.”

A defense ministry spokesman said Monday that the police, not the government, were responsible for blocking the activists, and added that South Korea’s military was ready to retaliate if North Korea launched an attack. South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said last Friday that the South would “completely destroy the origin of the attack” if Pyongyang followed through on its threat.

But the police chief in Paju, the border city near the North, said police were ordered to block the activists following a meeting with the city mayor and local police, as well as the South Korean military.

“We thought there was a danger for civilians,” the police chief, Kim Chang-sik, said.

Security analysts in Seoul say they have no reliable way to sift through the North’s regularly fiery rhetoric and separate the empty threats from the legitimate ones. Most, of course, prove to be little more than bluster. This year alone, the North laid out unusually specific pledges to “wipe out” Lee and his allies and carry out attacks on South Korean media outlets, even publishing the (incorrect) coordinates for several Seoul-based newspapers.

But not all threats are innocuous. Some experts here say the North telegraphed its 2010 attacks on the South — the torpedoing of a warship, which killed 46, and the shelling of a island, which killed four — with boilerplate promises to exact “revenge.”

In the most recent case, the North’s threat — published Friday by the state-run news agency — was attributed to the Western Front Command, a front-line unit in the Korean People’s Army, or KPA. The North said that the leaflets the activists planned to distribute, which are critical of new head of state Kim Jong Eun, were “slandering the dignity of [its] supreme leadership.” The North accused the South Korean military of engineering the event, and ended its dispatch by warning residents in the border town to evacuate.

“The KPA never makes an empty talk,” the dispatch said.

The South Korean activist group was composed largely of defectors from the authoritarian North, who now routinely criticize its human rights abuses and leaders’ riches. Park, the group’s leader, says that Pyongyang considers him a traitor, and he sometimes receives anonymous death threats. Seoul’s top spy agency last year said it arrested a North Korean agent who allegedly had been plotting to assassinate Park with a poison-tipped needle.

During the standoff Monday with police, Park told reporters he wanted to go ahead with the balloon drop, and said he’d gotten a permit for the protest nearly one month earlier.

“It’s not right to stop a legal protest because of North Korea,” Park said.

I predicted when LMB was elected on a supposedly hardline platform that there would turn out to be more continuity between his policies and those of his liberal predecessors than was commonly assumed. I think that prediction is probably bearing itself out.

As for the leaflets, I've always thought they were a dumb idea. They're not gonna incite anyone to overthrow the government, but they could very well lead to some kid who innocently picks one up on the way to school getting his whole family shipped off to the camps.

You can't have your foreign policy influenced and dictated to by fringe activists. Let them drop leaflets, the next time they're going to do something wilder and potentially more stupid. This isn't about dealing with North Korea, it's about showing who is in charge when it comes to dictating where the message comes from.

Under the Sunshine Boys, were activists ever actually forcibly stopped from sending balloons into North Korea? If not, then this policy represents a new level of coercion, and from a right-wing government.

My recollection is that under DJ and Roh, the government just more or less begged and cajoled people not to do things to insult the North, but usually didn't use police power to stop them. But my memory could be faulty in that regard.

Under the Sunshine Boys, were activists ever actually forcibly stopped from sending balloons into North Korea? If not, then this policy represents a new level of coercion, and from a right-wing government.

My recollection is that under DJ and Roh, the government just more or less begged and cajoled people not to do things to insult the North, but usually didn't use police power to stop them. But my memory could be faulty in that regard.

Talk to the families of the sailors who lost their lives during WC2002 thanks to the Norks. KDJ's (Kim Dae-Jung) men in black suits threatened them not to take the issue any further. The way that KDJ's and RMH's (Roh Moo-Hyun) administration acted with the grieving families is sickening.

At the end of the day the status quo suits pretty much everybody involved, barring of course the poor unfortunates who actually live as regular citizens in North Korea. Any kind of instability up there is just too stressful for South Korea and China to deal with, and I would also include the US, China and Russia in that too. I expect the rhetoric and minor skirmishes to continue, but no significant change to come about until some kind of bomb goes off among the people and forces them to rise up. But how long is that going to take?

North Korean refugees in South Korea have become the victims of the country's conservative forces. And it is how 50% of human rights activism in South Korea has become a politically leaned tool for the conservative cause.

You would naturally think that the North Korean refugees in South Korea are truest victims in the South Korean society, if you're not a biased person. This is why my church doesn't let any North Korean refugee in, or else we would associate ourselves with some South Korean conservative politician.

Not to mention that any involvement with a conservative politician or letting a North Korea refugee in doesn't promote good and quiet image of our church to the public when Lee Myung Bak's infamous church is promoting a very bad image of us Korean Christians.

At the end of the day the status quo suits pretty much everybody involved, barring of course the poor unfortunates who actually live as regular citizens in North Korea. Any kind of instability up there is just too stressful for South Korea and China to deal with, and I would also include the US, China and Russia in that too. I expect the rhetoric and minor skirmishes to continue, but no significant change to come about until some kind of bomb goes off among the people and forces them to rise up. But how long is that going to take?

One cannot restart a war with North Korea. Some politicians truly need North Korea as a great punching bag and for their political advancement.

Some of the average people who believe in freedom and democracy for North Korea turn out to the the ones who honestly want to justify dictatorship. You'll never know. Political freedom either liberates people or oppresses people in the Korean Peninsula. It's a very strange thing in terms of OP's news on the ballooning leaflets.